That seems like a lot of Blade Runner stuff in quick succession after a long time without anything new for the franchise, but the truth is, there was a brief boom in fictional works surrounding it in the wake of the original, ground-breaking first film.

“Blade Runner” may be the most influential science fiction movie of my lifetime. The 1982 film starred a terrific Harrison Ford as a world-weary detective assigned to find a terrorist cell of artificially intelligent cyborgs with super human capacities. Led by Rutger Hauer, the cyborgs have traveled to earth from space colonies in a desperate attempt to force their designer to disarm automatic self-destruct switches. Using the theme of a date-certain death, it is a story that explores what it...